


Sugar

by moon_custafer



Category: White Zombie - Fandom
Genre: Bela Lugosi, Gen, Multi, Period Typical Attitudes, Yuletide, pre-Code horror films, with THESE ZOMBIE EYES he rendered her powerless
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-17
Updated: 2019-12-17
Packaged: 2021-02-08 03:13:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21469120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moon_custafer/pseuds/moon_custafer
Summary: Trapped in her zombie state, a puppet of Murder Legendre, Madeleine can yet observe everything around her, and she's been doing more thinking than she ever did as a "free" woman.
Comments: 9
Kudos: 8
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Sugar

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Itylien](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Itylien/gifts).

In her dream, Madeleine stands among trees. It’s warm, the air lush with the scent of tropical blooms such as you could never purchase in New York City, no, not if you were rich as Rockefeller; but at the sight of the building before her, she shivers. It’s a mill, outwardly no different from many another, yet there’s something sinister about its half-timbered and roughly-mortared bulk.

Outside becomes inside, by some means she can’t quite understand. It seems to act like the “dissolve” in a cinema picture. In the darkness of the mill’s interior, the big cogs and wheels are turning with only the faintest creaking noises, and Madeleine is just thinking to herself that the engines that power the mill are awfully quiet, when she notices the human shapes that keep every wheel and cog in motion. They’re silent, except for their footsteps, and even those are the faintest shuffle. Their eyes are glassy. Some are colored men, most are white. _Strange_, Madeleine thinks, _that there should be so many white men in the tropics;_ though no more strange than to find them slaving in a mill. She realizes, then, that not a man among them is breathing.

All wear the same frozen expression— wherever the dead men’s souls may be, they’re not in the bodies that strain against the wooden wheels of this refinery. Madeleine can see sacks piled in a corner. A door opens and another figure shambles in, picks up a sack and mechanically shoulders it. 

The worst of it is, this earthly Hell smells like a candy factory, the air heavy with syrup. _This must be a sugar mill._ As Madeleine watches, one of the figures stumbles and falls through a railing on one of the mill’s higher levels. The wood must have rotted in the humid climate, and no one has bothered to make repairs, not with an uncomplaining workforce like this. The dead man falls without a cry, nor do the others look up, but the grinding noise of the machinery gets a little louder for a few minutes as it chews up the body that’s fallen into the main hull in which the sugar is processed. Madeleine covers her face, but she’s no more able to scream than the fallen mill-hand.

Someone a few months down the road is in for a nasty surprise when she goes to bake a cake. Or are things still at the molasses stage? Madeleine doesn’t know much about the processes of the sugar-cane industry, doesn’t know much about this island at all, beyond the usual images of flowers and the sea. She bites her lip, more determined than ever to find out why she’s here, and who’s behind all this.

A mill is a mill, and even one powered by the dead turns out to have a management office. She stands in the doorway and gazes at two men, arguing—no need to close the door for an argument when your workers are dead and dumb, and Madeleine, in any case, knows somehow that she’s invisible, or ought to be; but when one of them turns his head in her direction— What a face! Like Satan himself, and this man, at least, can see her. For a moment he looks as shocked as Madeleine feels; then an expression of smooth confidence returns to the devilish features, before the other man can notice anything amiss. Not that the latter would be inclined to notice anything, wrapped up in his own concerns as he seems. He’s rather a Byronic type, in riding clothes under a hat and cloak. Handsome, aquiline features, if running a little to seed, his complexion sallow.

“They are to be married within an hour!” he shouts. “There must be a way!“

”There is a way,” replies the other, adding: “The cost...the cost is heavy!“ Madeleine doesn’t doubt but that it is.

“You give me what I want,” says the gentleman in riding clothes, ”and you may ask anything.” The devil leans across and whispers something, and the gentleman reacts as if a hot poker has just touched his ear: ”No! Not that!” _That_ apparently refers to the bottle the devil is holding out to him:

“Only a pin point, Monsieur Beaumont, in a glass of wine, or perhaps... a flower.“

_A love potion_? Madeleine thinks. It seem so, by their earlier conversation. She wonders who she is, the poor girl for whom these two are bargaining.

”Keep it, monsieur.” The devil is still talking. “Keep it. You may change your mind. Send me word when you use it.“

”I’ll find another way!” Monsieur Beaumont picks up his hat and storms out of the mill. The other watches him go.

“There _is_ no other way.” He looks around for Madeleine, but she’s gone.

* * *

Madeleine does not gasp, or open her eyes. Her breathing is so shallow as to be scarce noticeable. Her eyes have been open all night in the dark of the well-appointed chamber in the half-ruined castle where Beaumont has brought her. But her soul has returned from its wanderings through time, back to the prison the voudou doctor has made of her body. Unable to control her actions, she yet has her thoughts, and she’s done a great deal of thinking this past week. She doesn’t know if her dream of the mill was a true vision, or the creation of her own brain— but she’s willing to bet it was a pretty accurate reconstruction of how Beaumont and Murder Legendre conspired in the hours before her wedding. If the dream was a bit too charitable to Beaumont, that was only some remaining traces of the friendship she’d once felt for him, when they’d merely been fellow-passengers on that ocean voyage to this dreadful island.

The voyage – ah! that’s where everything had begun to go wrong. How could she have missed it at the time? Mr. — _Monsieur_ — Beaumont had seemed but a kind gentleman seeking to pass the time on conversation on a long voyage. Had she really missed his glances? Had she really seen nothing suspect in his offer of making Neil his New York agent? She’d thought him a nice old confirmed bachelor – not _that_ old, but the latter... Yes, she’d believed him the type of man who could be, well, almost a girl-friend to her.

The truth became impossible to deny as M. Beaumont tried to make love to her as he walked her to the altar. And yet, even as he begged her to run away with him, she could not remonstrate out loud. Neil— Neil might have reacted— still such a boy in some ways— and the end result might have been trouble for him. M. Beaumont is a powerful man. So she’d kept quiet, polite; focused on revealing nothing, her face a mask. If she were able to laugh now, how bitterly would she do so. She’d been half a zombie already, trying to defend herself with one hand tied behind her back by Society’s implacable law of politeness. And then— she’d shudder if she still could— and then, at her wedding party— those eyes, in the goblet. That Satanic face. Those hands, knotted in a mystical sign. The scarf knotted around her throat until she could not breathe nor talk. Her missing scarf; Mother had given it to her before she left, worried that even in the Caribbean she’d catch her death of cold strolling the decks of the ship. Madeleine had lost it when they’d stopped at the chanting of those poor people burying one of their own in the road for fear of...

That coachman had been trying to warn her, she could see that now. She’d thought it was the wind that snatched away her scarf; it must have been the voudou man who’d called it to his hands. And not so long after, she really had caught her death.

* * *

In the half-ruined castle the _Liebensraum_ plays under Madeleine’s hands; she’s a competent pianist, but this music is none of her doing. Once, in a museum in New York, she saw a clockwork doll whose hands moved over the keyboard of a little spinet. She’s become that doll, in the old-fashioned dress the Creole maids have put on her at M. Beaumont’s instruction. She doesn’t even like the tune.

Madeleine recalls a picture she saw before leaving New York, a musical comedy, and a tune one of the comics played: _Sugar in the morning, sugar in the evening, sugar at supper time..._ Around and around the song had gone, while he complained that he couldn’t remember how to play the ending._. _Around and around the tune goes. She wishes she were back in New York, where there are skyscrapers and automobiles and smoke and noise and people are alive.

Beaumont comes up behind her, begging her for a smile, a frown, anything. All she can do is play louder. She almost wishes he’d put his hands round her throat and end this constant, endless choking sensation, the scarf strangling her— but he only places a necklace around her neck and weeps guiltily when the man— the man with the eyes, her real captor— comes down the stair, leans casually on the bannister, laughing at the two of them.

Though an angry hope flames up in her when Beaumont begs the voodoo man to release her, send her back— to Neil, or even to the grave— Madeleine is silent. Murder takes her hand and strokes it, grinning at Beaumont. How she would scream if her throat weren’t paralyzed— and yet, even under the spell, even behind the mask of her face, some part of Madeleine is still sharp enough to notice Murder’s smile is a strangely bitter one, for a man holding all the cards. And when Murder’s mind commands her up the stairs to be undressed and packed away by the two maids— doesn’t that mean he has things he dare not say in front of his puppet? She can hear him cry to Beaumont as she goes:

”Let’s drink to the future!”

Whose future? Madeleine can’t turn her head to look back. She thinks she hears, as she reaches the top of the stair, the tinkle of a shattered glass; but she continues down the hall to her chamber and the heavy door closes and any further sounds from below are shut out.

* * *

The frightened maids have dressed Madeleine as a medieval lady now, and she goes to the turret of the old fortress and gazes out at the sea. 

Neil oh darling Neil. He must be asleep, intoxicated in his grief, or feverish— it’s only when his mind wanders that Madeleine can reach out and touch it. Neil, so beautiful – is it shallow to love a man for his beauty? Plenty of admirers have praised hers, and what good has come of it? She wants to be the lover for a change; and Neil is all clean lines and smooth hair, with that one strand that comes loose and falls across his forehead when he’s excited.

Through the frozen lips of her mask Madeleine calls to him. Is it a false hope that the choking sensation in her throat seems to loosen, just a little?

Beaumont must be feverish too— blurred, he appears in the corner of her mind’s eye. He sits in his shirtsleeves at a table, looking more sallow and dissipated than ever. His appearance ought to repel her, but Madeleine feels a weird pity, for she can see the shadow that leers at him. Pity, and another tinge of hope, for she can see Murder’s full attention is on his new victim. The voudou doctor is feverish too, haloed with lust. When Beaumont, pleading, clutches Murder’s hand, the latter grins and pets him mockingly; but his suave response is the frailest shell of ice over black and swirling waters.

For the first time in a week, Madeleine feels her eyelids close. She cannot yet smile in relief, but she knows that Neil will find her. _The mills of the gods grind slow, she _can recall having read it somewhere; _but they grind exceedingly fine. _

_What _ _kind of confection are we all to become?_


End file.
